[12] Edinburgh Courant, 7th January, 1761.
[13] Count O'Rourke died at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1785.
OF THE IRISH MUSKETEERS.
In the army of Ferdinand II., Emperor of Austria (who succeeded his brother Matthias in 1619), then commanded by Albrecht, Count of Wallenstein and Duke of Friedland, were two brave Irish soldiers of fortune—James Butler, who commanded a regiment of Irish dragoons; and his younger brother, Walter, who was colonel of a regiment of Irish musketeers.
These gentlemen were nearly related to James, then Earl of Ormond, and were driven to seek service in foreign wars by the result of a quarrel between their family and King James VI. of Scotland and I. of England, who had unjustly wrested from the Butlers their valuable estates, and bestowed them upon his Scottish favourite, Sir Richard Preston, Laird of Craigmillar (near Edinburgh), and Knight of the Bath. This gentleman, who was afterwards created Lord Dingwall in the peerage of Scotland, and Earl of Desmond in that of Ireland, 6th June, 1614, claimed Ormond in right of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Butler, who was the only daughter of Thomas, Earl of Ormond, and widow of Theobald, Viscount of Theophelim. Such was the undue partiality of James for his countryman, the Viscount Dingwall, that in 1614, when Sir Walter, eldest son of Sir John Butler, third brother of the old Earl of Ormond, inherited that title, the Ormond estates (which in ancient times were an Irish principality on the left bank of the middle Shannon, in the northern part of Munster) were bestowed upon the stranger; and the king, to enforce his claim, wrote a very peremptory letter to the Irish Privy Council. Sir Arthur Chichester, Baron of Belfast, was at that time Lord Deputy and Chief Governor of Ireland. Finding the Council averse to this injustice, James, who was notorious for entertaining the most absurd ideas of his prerogative, took the matter into his own hands, and, charging the Earl of Ormond with "non-compliance," threw him into the Fleet prison, where he remained for eight years, enduring great want and misery, while all his old hereditary possessions were seized and confiscated, by which his family were reduced and ruined.
Preston, Lord Dingwall, was drowned in June, 1621 when on his way from Dublin to Scotland. He left an only daughter, Lady Elizabeth Preston, through whom his titles and Irish estates went afterwards to the Earls of Ossory.
The trouble in which the family became involved, and the wandering spirit which possessed the Irish, like the Scots of those days, led the earl's two cousins, James and Walter, into the Imperial service, where they soon obtained the command of regiments, and served under John de Tscerclai, the Count Tilly, and the great Wallenstein, in most of the battles of the Thirty Years' War.